Doing Statistics in awk

One exercise that offers a lot of interesting challenges in coding is to use a programming language for an application that it's not intended to be used for. Writing a Fortran compiler in TECO and solving the Towers of Hanoi problem in the troff text formatter are two examples from the legendary Hacker Purity Test. …

Analyzing Twitter Analytics Data in R

I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to become popular on Twitter. It's pretty much impossible if you're not already a celebrity or public figure, but I figured I'd try to maximize my success anyway. I did some data analysis using CSV data that I exported from the Twitter Analytics page. …

Data Science in C: Combining CSV with SQL

In the last episode of Data Science in C I talked about the parser portion of my CSV library, which I implemented using automata. Now that we've parsed the CSV code and converted it into an abstract table structure, it's time to implement some operations on the table data so that we can actually use …

Data Science in C: Programming a Turing Machine to Parse CSV Code

Okay, so maybe I ripped my featured image from the Hack-A-Day site, but that image of a personification of a Turing machine as an intelligent robot was too relevant to the topic of this post to pass up, so sue me. 😛 I want to talk about the first step to building data science or …

Analyzing WordPress Analytics Data in R

So a few days ago I talked about my recent obsession with data and how I started tabulating, charting, and analyzing SEO and similar data in Microsoft Works. Now I will talk about the subsequent data analyses that I did using the R programming language. Let's get to it... What is R? I would describe …

Data Analysis: Retro Edition with Microsoft Works 3.0

So recently I've started getting into some more data-oriented stuff - statistics, regression analysis, etc. It started with some spreadsheets and graphs that I was making in Microsoft Works and gradually transitioned into data analysis using R and eventually into actual AI programming. To chronicle this recent evolution properly, I think it best to start …